Distant Reader - subject-catechisms-freebo

Introduction

This is a Distant Reader "study carrel", a set of structured data intended to help the student, researcher, or scholar use & understand a corpus.

This study carrel was created on 2021-05-24 by Eric Morgan <emorgan@nd.edu>. The carrel was created using the Distant Reader zip2carrel process, and the input was a Zip file locally cached with the name input-file.zip. Documents in the Zip file have been saved in a cache, and each of them have been transformed & saved as a set of plain text files. All of the analysis -- "reading" -- has been done against these plain text files. For example, a short narrative report has been created. This Web page is a more verbose version of that report.

All study carrels are self-contained -- no Internet connection is necessary to use them. Download this carrel for offline reading. The carrel is made up of many subdirectories and data files. The manifest describes each one in greater detail.

Size

There are 33 item(s) in this carrel, and this carrel is 600,059 words long. Each item in your study carrel is, on average, 18,183 words long. If you dig deeper, then you might want to save yourself some time by reading a shorter item. On the other hand, if your desire is for more detail, then you might consider reading a longer item. The following charts illustrate the overall size of the carrel.

Readability

On a scale from 0 to 100, where 0 is very difficult and 100 is very easy, the documents have an average readability score of 95. Consequently, if you want to read something more simplistic, then consider a document with a higher score. If you want something more specialized, then consider something with a lower score. The following charts illustrate the overall readability of the carrel.

Word Frequencies

By merely counting & tabulating the frequency of individual words or phrases, you can begin to get an understanding of the carrel's "aboutness". Excluding "stop words", some of the more frequent words include:

god, christ, us, man, may, holy, shall, one, cor, rom, will, faith, things, lord, first, life, death, good, father, spirit, must, made, men, church, gods, doth, day, word, sin, grace, heb, body, law, mat, without, also, psal, world, yet, now, nature, many, make, great, covenant, therefore, power, act, vs, jesus

Using the three most frequent words, the three files containing all of those words the most are The main principles of Christian religion in a 107 short articles or aphorisms, generally receiv''d as being prov''d from scripture : now further cleared and confirm''d by the consonant doctrine recorded in the articles and homilies of the Church of England ... / by Tho. Adams ..., The Christians A.B.C., or, A Christian alphabet contayning grounds of knowledge vnto saluation first propounded in alphabeticall forme, each proposition being seconded with some solid reasons : secondly repeated by way of question and answer, with the proofe of euery particular point of doctrine, acquainting the reader with the most select texts of scripture, whereupon our Christian faith is grounded / by I.P. B. of D., and A little starre, giving some light into the counsels and purposes of God revealed in the Scriptures. Or A catechisme, wherein these ensuing principles. 1. What God is, and how he manifests himselfe. 2 Why he made the world and man. 3. Mans condition, what, 1. by creation. 2. By his fall. 3. By being restored by Jesus Christ. 4 The uses and ends of the law. 5. What the Gospell is. 6. Justification what it is. 7. Sanctification what, and how it is wrought. 8. What repentance is. 9. The use and ends of the Scriptures. 10. What true prayer is. 11. Baptisme, and the Lords Supper, why, and how used. 12. Generall redemption what, and how to be adjudged of. 13. Resurrection and judgement what. 14. Heaven and Hell what, in truth and misterie. All which are briefly by way of question and answer opened and explained. / By VVilliam Mason..

The most frequent two-word phrases (bigrams) include:

holy ghost, jesus christ, holy spirit, early english, english books, lords supper, iesus christ, roman non, books online, christian religion, lord jesus, page images, new testament, one god, god will, creation partnership, text creation, christ jesus, right hand, every man, holy scriptures, let us, vnto vs, foxes acts, give us, eternall life, one another, god made, good things, eternal life, new covenant, every one, three persons, god doth, shall bee, good lord, two things, tcp schema, lords prayer, characters represented, represented either, image sets, true god, christ iesus, last day, lord iesus, early works, old testament, may bee, one person

And the three file that use all of the three most frequent phrases are A little starre, giving some light into the counsels and purposes of God revealed in the Scriptures. Or A catechisme, wherein these ensuing principles. 1. What God is, and how he manifests himselfe. 2 Why he made the world and man. 3. Mans condition, what, 1. by creation. 2. By his fall. 3. By being restored by Jesus Christ. 4 The uses and ends of the law. 5. What the Gospell is. 6. Justification what it is. 7. Sanctification what, and how it is wrought. 8. What repentance is. 9. The use and ends of the Scriptures. 10. What true prayer is. 11. Baptisme, and the Lords Supper, why, and how used. 12. Generall redemption what, and how to be adjudged of. 13. Resurrection and judgement what. 14. Heaven and Hell what, in truth and misterie. All which are briefly by way of question and answer opened and explained. / By VVilliam Mason. A short catechism about Baptism. By John Tombes, B.D., and A briefe catechisme concerning church-governemnt. By that Reverend Divine Mr. Iohn Robinson, and may fitly be adjoyned to Mr. Perkins six Principles as an appendix thereto..

While often deemed superficial or sophomoric, rudimentary frequencies and their associated "word clouds" can be quite insightful:

Keywords

Sets of keywords -- statistically significant words -- can be enumerated by comparing the relative frequency of words with the number of times the words appear in an entire corpus. Some of the most statistically significant keywords in the carrel include:

god, christ, lord, cor, father, church, spirit, tcp, holy, son, sacrament, psal, mat, man, law, gospel, covenant, yea, world, tim, soul, scripture, roman, rom, religion, men, joh, jesus, gods, ghost, faith, duty, acts, word, thy, sunday, sins, sinner, scriptures, saviour, saints, sabbath, repent, question, proue, promise, prayers, prayer, perfection, parliament

And now word clouds really begin to shine:

Topic Modeling

Topic modeling is another popular approach to connoting the aboutness of a corpus. If the study carrel could be summed up in a single word, then that word might be god, and A brief summe of Christian religion, or, Of things most necessary for a Christians knowledge, practice, and comfort composed by Thomas Greaves. is most about that word.

If the study carrel could be summed up in three words ("topics") then those words and their significantly associated titles include:

If the study carrel could be summed up in five topics, and each topic were each denoted with three words, then those topics and their most significantly associated files would be:

Moreover, the totality of the study carrel's aboutness, can be visualized with the following pie chart:

Noun & Verbs

Through an analysis of your study carrel's parts-of-speech, you are able to answer question beyonds aboutness. For example, a list of the most frequent nouns helps you answer what questions; "What is discussed in this collection?":

man, things, death, life, faith, men, day, body, sin, grace, world, time, heb, nature, thing, word, power, glory, name, heart, psal, doth, end, sins, self, works, way, text, others, person, love, part, words, prayer, manner, people, nothing, sinne, spirit, persons, obedience, mercy, children, repentance, acts, truth, will, child, work, hath

An enumeration of the verbs helps you learn what actions take place in a text or what the things in the text do. Very frequently, the most common lemmatized verbs are "be", "have", and "do"; the more interesting verbs usually occur further down the list of frequencies:

is, be, are, was, have, do, were, being, made, did, had, make, come, said, called, let, give, according, pray, been, say, know, take, see, believe, done, concerning, given, am, hath, has, required, bee, put, having, set, came, created, receive, does, live, doe, blessed, die, appointed, call, think, teach, doth, suffer

Proper Nouns

An extraction of proper nouns helps you determine the names of people and places in your study carrel.

god, a., q., christ, cor, lord, rom, father, thou, holy, church, mat, spirit, 〉, ◊, gods, c., law, 〈, jesus, tim, eph, covenant, hath, act, gen., heaven, joh, john, son, pet, luk, ghost, i., word, ans, psal, tcp, yea, faith, lords, doe, wee, col, christs, heb, ., q, matth, sacrament

An analysis of personal pronouns enables you to answer at least two questions: 1) "What, if any, is the overall gender of my study carrel?", and 2) "To what degree are the texts in my study carrel self-centered versus inclusive?"

his, it, he, our, they, we, i, them, him, their, us, you, my, thy, me, your, himself, thee, themselves, her, its, she, vvhat, ye, mine, vp, ours, vnto, theirs, one, ii, yours, s, u, ''s, †, ourselves, gods, whosoever, p, lov''st, f, à, z, yee, y, wil, vntill, thou, teeir

Below are words cloud of your study carrel's proper & personal pronouns.

Adjectives & Verbs

Learning about a corpus's adjectives and adverbs helps you answer how questions: "How are things described and how are things done?" An analysis of adjectives and adverbs also points to a corpus's overall sentiment. "In general, is my study carrel positive or negative?"

other, good, such, first, many, same, great, own, holy, true, more, whole, outward, second, much, last, new, able, perfect, necessary, particular, eternal, glorious, doth, free, third, -, non, roman, spiritual, early, ioh, dead, little, full, christian, short, right, wicked, very, due, present, most, godly, general, english, better, least, inward, infinite

not, so, then, also, now, therefore, only, more, onely, first, as, most, ever, up, well, secondly, here, thus, very, never, yet, even, together, there, out, forth, away, much, again, all, indeed, thereof, thirdly, else, thereby, especially, rather, once, that, is, vs, in, alone, whatsoever, down, truly, still, just, no, therein

Next steps

There is much more to a study carrel than the things outlined above. Use this page's menubar to navigate and explore in more detail. There you will find additional features & functions including: ngrams, parts-of-speech, grammars, named entities, topic modeling, a simple search interface, etc.

Again, study carrels are self-contained. Download this carrel for offline viewing and use.

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